"Each voice features four oscillators capable of generating classic and complex waveforms,..."

That, and Dave Smith saying in his presentation video that he took the best from the Evolver and Prophet 08, indicates that this may be 2 x DCO and 2 x wavetable oscillators. Now, that might not be a problem - IMO the most important analogue part is the drive->filter->amp chain.

With the delay section in each of the 12 voices, the mixdown is probably digital too - I doubt he does AD->delay->DA per voice into an analogue -mixer, like for the 4 voice evolver with it's 4 separate stereo voice outputs (i.e. I have further doubt about there being 12 separate stereo voice outputs). Anyway, he doesn't claim a 100% analogue signal path, like for the Prophet 08

Evolver block diagram attached for reference. BTW, that diagram was taken down from the DSI site many years ago. Some analogue zealots got angry when faced with the fact that it wasn't an all analogue path (which was a popular belief that DSI most likely was happy about letting continue ), but a ca. 80% digital / 20% analogue synth. Not that there's anything wrong about that for us who tolerate hybrid synths and mixed architectures...

From another forum, reported by a guy who visited the DSI booth at NAMM:

"The oscillators are virtual, produced by a total of six SHARC chips. Output is then converted to analog to go to filters and VCAs. The chips also handle effects."

Now you guys know why the ad mentions analog VCAs, analog filters, etc. but no analog oscillators. It's a hybrid... To me, this isn't necessarily a negative, because I'm not one of those people who feels a synth has to have analog VCOs to sound good (hell, I own a Nord Modular G2X ). It has potential to sound good in the right hands, imo.

I respect Dave Smith so much for his contribution to synth history, but he is nowhere near as good at demoing his own gear as Amos is at demoing Moog's. The difference between success and failure for this synth is an awesome demo - hopefully Sonic State will get there before NAMM closes.

Cool! Six SHARCs - that's exactly the same as in a Solaris. A healthy amount of computing power. And a good thing; it means that oscillators and so on can easily have more features than in an all analogue implementation.

With reference to my previous posting, I colour coded the functional blocks in the Evolver block diagram by signal domains: green = analogue, blue = digital, orange = mixed signal. This should indicate that "a bit" (80% of it) of digital isn't necessarily bad, especially as it has the approval of many of the most outspoken of the "pure analogue crowd"

I don't see a problem with digital OSCs as long as they don't alias. I asked Chris the DSI software guy on the DSI forum and he said they had put a lot of work into removing aliasing and it was only there in a few edge cases which they hope to fix before release.

I don't see a problem with digital OSCs as long as they don't alias. I asked Chris the DSI software guy on the DSI forum and he said they had put a lot of work into removing aliasing and it was only there in a few edge cases which they hope to fix before release.

- Pulse and Tri - Pulsewidth control
- Saw - Supersaw effect (note: not complete in NAMM units)
- Noise - Pink on the left, White in the middle, Blue/Violet on the right
- Wavetables - Blends between 3 different waveforms, one on the left, one in the middle, one on the right

- 4 LFOs up to 4kHz rate, sync and multiple shapes
- 4 Envelopes - VCA, Filter and 2 Auxiliary. ADSR plus delay
- 16 Mod slots - Oscillators can be used as sources for FM control of a wide range of params

* Two Pressure- and Position-sensitive touch faders for added control in addition to the pitch and mod wheels
* 4 Delay lines

- Can sync to internal arp clock or to external MIDI clock
- ~1 second buffer for each delay line
- Amount, Feedback, and Rate controls on front panel
- Delay time ranges from reverb and flanger effects to a looper with feedback turned to max
- Delay algorithms not finalized in NAMM units and will be improved by release

* Tuned Feedback
* Expanded Arpeggiator modes
* Quick mod section:

- example: holding 'mod source' and hitting 'Osc 1' creates a new mod with 'Osc 1' as the source and brings up the screen. Then holding 'mod destination' and moving the 'Air' encoder assigns the destination to 'Air'. Simple!
- Sorting of mods by slot number, mod source or mod destination which includes the fixed mods (destination params for LFOs and Envelopes) to quickly deconstruct programs. Makes it very easy to see what mods are affecting what parameters at a glance

* Playlist mode for queueing up programs to use in a set for quick 1-button access to quickly load presets. 4 Playlists with 10 presets plus an extended playlist mode if more complicated setups are needed

I think the combination of purely VA oscillators with analog filters and amps is a very interesting concept for a polysynth. Are there any other modern synths that do it this way?_________________Antimon's Window@soundcloud@Flattrhome - you can't explain music

For the analog purists that whine about inaudible aliasing - the slightest amount of analog filtering removes the aliasing. So unless you plan on always playing with the filter wide open, I don't see it as a problem.

I tested this out by creating waveforms made of only eight steps. I was able to create very convincing sine waves out of it with just a bit of lowpass filtering.

Plus there is the fact that aliasing is not always bad - it is just bad when you don't want it or don't use it to your advantage. Going back to my eight step waveform, I added an envelope to the filter with fast attack and a short decay. The attack opened the filter to allow the added harmonics from the aliasing to come through. The decay then filtered those harmonics out, leaving an alomst perfect sine wave. Sonically, it was very similar to an FM bass sound. The FM modulator adds harmoics at the start of a sound, and as the modulation level drops you are left with a sine wave._________________JacobWatters.com

For the analog purists that whine about inaudible aliasing - the slightest amount of analog filtering removes the aliasing. So unless you plan on always playing with the filter wide open, I don't see it as a problem.

I tested this out by creating waveforms made of only eight steps. I was able to create very convincing sine waves out of it with just a bit of lowpass filtering.

Plus there is the fact that aliasing is not always bad - it is just bad when you don't want it or don't use it to your advantage. Going back to my eight step waveform, I added an envelope to the filter with fast attack and a short decay. The attack opened the filter to allow the added harmonics from the aliasing to come through. The decay then filtered those harmonics out, leaving an alomst perfect sine wave. Sonically, it was very similar to an FM bass sound. The FM modulator adds harmoics at the start of a sound, and as the modulation level drops you are left with a sine wave.

I don't really think that aliasing applies here - a VA oscillator implemented properly on modern hardware shouldn't suffer from aliasing at all. If they do, then that will be a major issue with DSI's implementation which people are entitled to complain about until it gets fixed. I'm assuming that it won't be an issue.

But: I think your example with aliasing issues is inaccurate. The main problem (for those who consider it as such) with for example the Evolver's wavetable oscillators appears when you use waveforms with overtones that are high enough to hit the Nyquist frequency for notes that you use normally. The overtones will bounce back into the audible spectrum and cause discord. Same thing with the simple sawtooth oscillator in computer languages like ChucK, or Soundtracker on the good old Amiga.

This can't be remedied fully with a lowpass filter, because the bouncing overtones can go pretty low - you would have to muffle the sound which might not always be what you want. On the old Amiga they "fixed" this by slamming a fixed lowpass filter at the end of the sound chain, which everyone eventually turned off because it just made it sound like you had covered the speaker with a pillow.

A sinewave is not an example of the issue I talked about above, because a sine wave has no overtones. The extra sound you get when you use a low resolution as in your example is that of the carrier wave itself - like a downsample effect which adjusts along with the pitch._________________Antimon's Window@soundcloud@Flattrhome - you can't explain music

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